Traveling through east Texas on my way back home Sunday, I saw this image on a Navajo Trucking rig.

I just could not believe those eyes, y'all, just could not. Now, I don't know how much of the rest of the image is authentic (her headdress and the coils around her neck, for example), but I am skeptical.

As I stared at that image, I wondered why in the world the company portrayed a Navajo woman with blue eyes. It occured to me later that it is for the same reasons PoC are encouraged to take on, or prized for being born with, "European" features IRL.

In theory, such features bring us closer to a standard of beauty that most people of European descent can't even achieve. They make us "stand out," "more beautiful," "different."

But I wasn't thinking of any of those descriptors as that truck rolled by me. I was thinking, "How sad." It isn't enough that Navajo Trucking appropriated names and images of a people to "represent" their company. They altered those images to conform to a certain aesthetic, perpetuating a long-standing pattern of trying to own and control the bodies of WoC and how our bodies will be represented.

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Seen

Traveling through east Texas on my way back home Sunday, I saw this image on a Navajo Trucking rig.

I just could not believe those eyes, y'all, just could not. Now, I don't know how much of the rest of the image is authentic (her headdress and the coils around her neck, for example), but I am skeptical.

As I stared at that image, I wondered why in the world the company portrayed a Navajo woman with blue eyes. It occured to me later that it is for the same reasons PoC are encouraged to take on, or prized for being born with, "European" features IRL.

In theory, such features bring us closer to a standard of beauty that most people of European descent can't even achieve. They make us "stand out," "more beautiful," "different."

But I wasn't thinking of any of those descriptors as that truck rolled by me. I was thinking, "How sad." It isn't enough that Navajo Trucking appropriated names and images of a people to "represent" their company. They altered those images to conform to a certain aesthetic, perpetuating a long-standing pattern of trying to own and control the bodies of WoC and how our bodies will be represented.

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